How does enterprise account sharing help users solve the problems of cost optimization and budget allocation

Let's start with a short story, which is also a common situation for many entrepreneurial teams:

Xiao Wang is the R&D leader of an Internet startup company. When he started his business, his R&D team was only about 10 people. At that time, his biggest pain point was how to lead the technical team to implement Idea as soon as possible and launch the business. Therefore, the biggest demand at that time was that the business could be rapidly developed and iterated. At the same time, the business volume was not too large, the cost of cloud resources was not too high, and the cost allocation of cloud resources was not too important. However, with the rapid development of the business, the business architecture has also changed from the original single application to the micro service application. At the same time, Xiao Wang's company has also expanded rapidly, with R&D personnel expanding from 10 to more than 100.

At this time, Xiao Wang, as the CTO of the company, had to focus more on the management of the R&D team from the technical architecture governance. At this time, the R&D team in front of him was divided into seven or eight groups, respectively responsible for different micro service modules, including user center, transaction center, log center, etc. The cost of cloud resources grew exponentially, and cost optimization and budget allocation became Xiao Wang's top priority.

Is there a good tool to help Xiao Wang solve these problems? At this time, it is necessary to use an advanced enterprise feature - enterprise ledger.

Introduction to SAE's ability to divide accounts

The Serverless application engine (SAE), as a mature and excellent PaaS platform after years of development, naturally has the ability to divide accounts for enterprises. Its core is to complete the classification of application bills through Alibaba Cloud's Tag tag system, and then make some configurations through Alibaba Cloud's expense center to finally complete the division.

Label planning

When cloud resources (i.e. applications in SAE) are gradually increasing, tags can be used to group and manage and classify resources to facilitate search and aggregation of resources. The most common is to set different labels for different environments or projects. Examples are as follows:

• Environment isolation: Bind different labels for different environments (such as production environment and test environment), operating systems (such as Windows Server and Linux) or client platforms (such as iOS and Android).

• Project management: In team or project management, you can add labels with groups, projects or departments as dimensions (such as CostCenter: aliyun) to achieve grouping and ledger management.

Implementation method

The operation method of SAE to realize enterprise account division is as follows:

1. Plan labels for resources (applications) based on organization or business dimensions. (① in the figure)

2. Bind labels for applications through SAE console or API to establish the relationship between applications and labels. (② in the figure)

3. View the expense bill through Alibaba Cloud User Center. (③ in the figure)

Step 1

First, plan labels according to your own business, and then go to the application management page of the SAE console to edit labels. Labels are composed of a pair of key values, and each application can have up to 20 labels.

Step 2

You need to enable the expense tag in the expense center. After the tag is enabled, the cloud resource bill contained in the related tag will actually carry the tag information. Only when the bill is tagged, can we filter the bill details through tags.

In addition, we can add a new financial unit and allocate the resources of related tags to the financial unit. The financial unit here can be understood as a collection of expense statistics. It allocates resource instances to the created "financial unit", and flexibly summarizes and views the bill expense of the corresponding resource instance according to the "financial unit" dimension. For example, different cloud resources with the same label (equivalent to the same department) can be unified into one financial unit for unified bill statistics and management.

Step 3

Finally, you can view the relevant detailed bills of the corresponding financial unit in the sub ledger bill, and export them for further data processing. The "sub ledger bill" contains the cost details of the SAE application CPU and memory. Users can view the specific usage of each "sub ledger item". At the same time, each charge item also contains label information, so it serves as a reference for internal sub ledger of the enterprise.

Check the custom column in the sub ledger bill, and the quantity will be deducted from the resource package to display the measurement details on the console.

At this point, we can see the relevant bill details. For customers who pay as you go, we can see the usage of the relevant instances. Users who have purchased resource packages can also see the resource package deduction.

In addition, the bill details can be filtered and displayed according to the tag, and the entire bill can also be exported to a CSV file for statistical analysis.

summary

We can find that the enterprise sub ledger function is a scenario for enterprise customer consumption expense sub ledger, which solves the internal chargeback problem of enterprise expenses. Enterprise expense sub ledger is an indispensable demand for large enterprises and the growing small and medium-sized enterprises where Xiao Wang is located. It is not only an important symbol for an enterprise to move towards standardization and maturity, but also an important consideration for enterprises to select cloud products on the cloud. Therefore, the label ledger function is also an important embodiment of SAE's enterprise level capabilities.

Serverless application engine SAE (Serverless App Engine) is a fully hosted, O&M free, and highly flexible general PaaS platform. SAE supports the full hosting of Spring Cloud, Dubbo, HSF, Web applications, XXL-JOB and ElasticJob tasks, zero transformation migration, no threshold container, and provides many enhanced capabilities and enterprise level advanced features on the open source side.